Posted on 12/13/2005 4:33:25 PM PST by SJackson
Researchers leading 19 young whooping cranes from Wisconsin to a wildlife refuge in Florida with ultralight aircraft made their second-to-last flight Monday, setting the stage for arrival at their destination today if weather permits.
Operation Migration, coordinating the effort to establish a second migratory flock of the endangered birds in North America, said the cranes traveled 99 miles Monday to reach Florida's Gilchrist County, raising the total distance traveled to 1,116 miles.
Plans called for the last flight to include a fly-over of Dunnellon Municipal Airport, one of the places where the organizers encourage the public to turn out to see the birds in flight.
Pilots and everyone else who works with the cranes wear crane-like costumes as part of procedures designed to keep the birds wary of humans once they are living in the wild.
As a result of the project, now in its fifth year, about 40 adult cranes migrate on their own. They were hatched in captivity, raised at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin and led south in the fall to the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge near Crystal River, Fla.
The new group of young cranes left Necedah Oct. 14. Workers housed them in portable pens at stops on the way south, and in some cases they had to wait for several days for favorable weather to continue the journey.
For the first time this fall, four other young cranes were released in hope they would fly south with other adult whooping cranes of the more-common sandhill cranes at the Necedah refuge. The four left with a flock of sandhill cranes on Thanksgiving Day, and one that has a radio transmitter was tracked near Louisville after flying at least 455 miles the first day.
The young cranes were hatched last spring at the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland and transported to Necedah in June for conditioning and training as they grew.
The only other migrating flock of whooping cranes has about 200 birds. They fly from Canada to winter on the Texas Gulf Coast.
The whooping crane, the tallest bird in North America, was near extinction in 1941, with only about 20 left.
And no, that's not a shotgun.
My sister used to work for the Crane Foundation (location of Operation Migration) and I got a first hand look at the place there and was really impressed at the number of cranes from all corners of the world there. I never knew there were cranes from places like Vietnam or northern Russia.
Insert wisecrack about Helen Thomas here.
I've witnessed migrating Cranes before here in Indiana. It's neat to see them.
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